The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

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Monday, July 18, 2016

The long and short of it
is that even though Israel has strict gun control laws there are many
armed citizens out about at all times, as anybody that has visited the
country can testify to

The Islamist terror attack in Nice
France, carried out by a jihadist in a heavy truck, should be yet
another blow to the Democrat gun control movement in the U.S., and an
indictment of the Euro-socialist model of government that the left
adores.

First
and most obviously, the attacker used a commonly available, useful, but
potentially dangerous tool to slaughter many more people than his
fellow jihadist in Orlando managed with firearms. Are we to ban heavy
trucks now? It is probable that some Islamist nutcase in America will
try to imitate his French co-religionist. When that occurs will
President Obama bewail the availability of heavy trucks—easier to rent
from U-Haul than buying a book?

There
is another aspect of this tragedy that undercuts the gun controllers as
well. France is one of the world’s most restrictive nations when it
comes to ownership of firearms, yet saw its people helplessly victimized
by an armed (the driver also apparently carried a pistol though
seemingly without effect) and brutal attacker without effective
recourse, despite enhanced security efforts in the country. If such an
event happened in some parts of America, particularly in a state that
doesn’t unreasonably restrict the right to carry, there at least would
be a significant possibility that a civilian on the scene could stop or
at least mitigate the attack.

Of
course, gun controllers will argue this is mere fantasy and that armed
civilians would not and could not stop a runaway jihadist in a truck.
Except that we have very good evidence that this can happen from many incidents in Israel.
Several years before the latest “knife intifada” Palestinian-Arab
terrorists launched a similar series of attacks with vehicles (with
bulldozers being a favorite) much like the Nice attack. And they
continue to occasionally attempt this type of attack. Although many
Israelis have been killed and injured in these attacks, they are
frequently frustrated by armed citizens, resulting in little more than
dead Arab jihadist drivers.

I discussed these attacks and many others involving armed civilians
a few years ago in Counter-Terror Magazine. The long and short of it
is that even though Israel has strict gun control laws there are many
armed citizens out about at all times, as anybody that has visited the
country can testify to. Some of these are on-duty soldiers, but many
others are off-duty troops, reservists going to or from depots, a large
number of armed civilian security guards, ordinary civilians permitted
to carry in certain areas, some public transit and tour bus drivers, and
other civilians who served in combat units and can more easily acquire
firearms permits.

The
net result of this is that a jihadist attacker in Israel, whether armed
with a vehicle, knife or a firearm, is unlikely to last long. Attacks frequently occur, but they are also usually frustrated,
almost always with fewer casualties than we see in attacks in other
countries, or no casualties at all. Most of these attacks are not even
published in the foreign press. When foreign reporters do comment, it
is often to lament the disproportionate number of dead Palestinians to
Israelis, in the perverse dance of moral equivalency that the leftist
media and politicians engage between slain murderers and their victims.

Specifically, in the case of the bulldozer
(or front-end loader) attacks on Israelis a few years ago, at least two
were ended by armed civilians or off duty soldiers, while most other
attacks have been thwarted or shortened by police or on-duty soldiers.
The U.S. doesn’t have anything like the number of armed police,
paramilitary border police, and armed soldiery in and around its cities
as Israel does. But we do have millions of armed civilians who could
foil or mitigate such attacks in such a situation. And for those that
will say that a civilian with a typical concealed carry handgun (of say
modest size and caliber) could not stop a terrorist in a truck, take a
look at the video showing the conclusion of the attack in Nice, where
police engage the attacker with handguns,
likely little different from what many citizens carry in America today.
At the very least they could put out a tire, distract or injure the
driver, or otherwise reduce the likely deadliness of such an attack.

After the Nice attack, residents booed French officials and complained that the government had not done enough to protect them. This despite the fact that France has been in a state of emergency
since last year’s attacks in Paris. That emergency order was slated to
expire in two weeks until the recent attack. Despite massive
deployments of troops and police French security services are still
unable to prevent such mass casualty attacks by Islamic militants.

Israel
and the United States, perhaps uniquely among modern Western
democracies, and for different reasons, possess a better ability to
deter and frustrate such attacks.

France
for all its centralized police forces, massive internal military
deployments, and draconian gun control law is now beset by a violent
Islamist onslaught against a mostly cowed and defenseless population,
with jihadist attackers causing heavy civilian losses at every turn.
And this, along with open immigration and a stagnated state dominated
economy is the model that Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democrat party
would have the United State emulate. That seems to be a pretty good
model for Republicans to run against.

Jonathan F. KeilerSource: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/an_armed_citizenry_can_frustrate_and_deter_vehicle_attacks.html Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.